Recent Activity

[extrapenguin]

Part of DW is that one has to link where one participates in chatter instead of it automagically being pushed to all one's followers, so in the further interests of I Aten't Dead, here are some recent places I've been saloning/participating in conversations:

dreamwars – Star Wars discussion comm with a weekly post each Monday. Just passed its first anniversary! I try to turn up every week, and there's some chill discussion in there.

Community norms & advice re: writing c-drama fic as a white westerner?in nirvana_in_fire – I only posted the one comment, but I've been looking through the rest of the responses. (Note: please don't dogpile anyone, even if they're wrong – 1 or 2 callouts is sufficient.)

I also have an exchange going on! charactorex is a 500-word/clean sketch on unline paper-minimum exchange that matches on solo characters. (Think classic Trick or Treat exchange.) Sign-ups are open until 16:00 IDT (UTC+3) on Saturday.

Also I'm participating in We Die Like Fen again. Works reveal Friday the 13th. Pondering over littleblackdressex – I think I could just recycle most of my requests and letter from last year...

Comments

[china_shop]

Thanks for the link to the NiF discussion and your comment therein. :-)

[benbenberi]

The OP appears to have closed and hidden the entire comment thread. Oh, well. It must have been a bit exciting.

[extrapenguin]

A few people – me included – questioned the premise of their post and I can see why they'd want to close discussion, even if the conversation was civil and mature throughout. (Though at 91 comments, it might also have felt overwhelming for that reason alone!) I managed to find my comment in my e-mails:

I have thought long and hard about what to say here, but in the end, all I can come up with is that your (and others') framing of the question comes across as (presumably unintentionally) deeply exotifying. Nirvana in Fire is a historic fantasy canon. Like with other such canons, the canon itself is what one needs to study to create canon-compliant fic. We aren't born knowing Harry Potter worldbuilding, for instance, yet people manage to write fic set at Hogwarts all the time. If you for whatever reason feel like you need a deeper backing, just watch some more cdramas. The whole framing of "oh noes it is unpossible to write about teh incomprehensible chinese" is kind of skeevy.

Another strain in The Discourse(TM) that I notice is white guilt – it's like, instead of asking questions along the lines of "Hey I want to make sure I'm doing X right, does anyone know of any helpful resources?", the focus is on handwringing about whether or not it's okay for white people to write cdrama fic and thus making their emotions PoC's problem by requiring handholding and assurance that they're not being racist. The former is constructive; the latter makes PoC quit the fandom.

That is to say: people who are not any flavor of Chinese have been writing NIF fic for years, and I have yet to see a person complain about insufficient Chineseness. (And I hang out with a bunch of Chinese diaspora people.) If you want to combat racism in fandom, I agree with the point made elsewhere that the best metric is how you treat your fellow fans.

A fellow commenter replied with a link to a podcast episode about emotional labor in a related TTRPG context, and someone else posted a top-level link to a relevant Twitter thread by Jeanette Ng that I managed to dig out of my browser history, but other than that, it seems to be gone. I have page 4 on flatview open, but that was mostly responses and I don't feel okay copypasting other people's comments without their permission.

[benbenberi]

Thanks! Yes, I can see how conversation of this kind can get fraught even when all parties are well-intentioned and polite. I'm glad she's put it back on view so late-comers like me can read it.

[china_shop]

Jsyk, it's back but the threads are frozen. (I'm glad it's back -- there was some great discussion, and it would be a shame for it to be lost.)

[extrapenguin]

Yw! I think it's a point that often gets lost in the mainstream discussions of the matter I've seen.

[reshiel]

Thank you for alerting me to the existence of the Nirvana in Fire comm! 👀 And that's a valuable conversation to have.

[extrapenguin]

Yw! I've mostly fallen out of active NIF fandom, but the comm admin seems to post at least weekly so it's not a ghost town.

[annathecrow]

oh, siiigh. Did WDLF move servers and not post the new link to the old one? Can I have a link, or should I assume it's for invited only? (...or wait for the next server, if this round is already running?)

If I don't manage to sign up for charactorex you're free to shoot me. I really want to! I'm just all over the place due to Maythe4th finishing this week! (And Life Stuff, ugh. Reality, why.)

Also, I'm glad that you're enjoying dreamwars, obviously :D

[extrapenguin]

I DM'd the link! WDLF generally only posts important announcements on EAD; I had completely blanked on the fact you weren't there, lol. Maybe now you'll catch the next round as it happens?

If I don't manage to sign up for charactorex you're free to shoot me.
I shall hold you to this and send you a Friendly Reminder on Thursday. :P (I'm AFK over the weekend.) I agree that Life Stuff is terrible and should stop affecting precious writing and exchange-signup time.